Michelle Malkin on "Google's Kiddie Predators"


Posted On: Friday - February 7th 2020 11:21AM MST
In Topics: 
  Pundits  Artificial Stupidity  Orwellian Stupidity  Educational Stupidity  iEspionage

(Picture straight off of Vdare.)



Michelle Malkin is Peak Stupidity's number 2 written pundit. Perhaps it's that these two (her and Ann Coulter) are easy on the eyes, but either way, you can't say we have a bias against women ...anymore than we have a bias against pretty much everything... We have mentioned Mrs. Malkin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and perhaps a few other times.

Besides writing on immigration stupidity, Michelle Malkin has been exposing the Orwellian stupidity that is being implemented in the youth propaganda camps err, government schools, for some time now. In her latest column, What Will It Take to Stop Google's Kiddie Predators?, she scares me (at least) with information about how google mines data from the electronic devices that are ubiquitous in the schools now. Some of it is accidental data "breaches" (just a breach, don't be alarmed!), and some of it is purposeful. Here are details on a data breach of little kids' private world:
This week, the tech giant admitted for the first time that its data export service, Google Takeout, had accidentally sent the private information and videos of untold thousands of users to other strangers' accounts. The breach occurred in late November, but users only started receiving notices and apologies on Monday—nearly three months later.

"We are notifying people about a bug that may have affected users who used Google Takeout to export their Google Photos content between November 21 and November 25," an email sheepishly explained. "These users may have received either an incomplete archive, or videos—not photos—that were not theirs. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again. We are very sorry this happened."

Can you imagine a similar breach of minors' photos and videos stored on students' Google Drives or Chromebooks or smartphones or home computers used to log on to mandatory learning management systems integrated with Google, such as Canvas or Schoology or Blackboard? It's easy if you try.
That business is enough to want to keep your kid off of the school's devices, but the purposeful stuff is another matter. See, Big-Ed LUVS, LUVS, LUVS this sort of thing. The wasted time mandated for teachers in the Schools of Education does not teach them to be any better in dealing with the children. However, SOMETHING has got to go on in those classes, and all those theses won't just up and write themselves. That's where all the mumbo-jumbo, mentioned in the 2nd half of Advancements in Higher Education, comes from. (As I wrote, the worst part is that the teachers use the mumbo-jumbo terms on the kids themselves, such as “I am learning to: use prior knowledge (schema) to make connections and inferences when I am reading”, that's on the papers, in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!)

These teachers want to feel that they are special for having spent that extra $20,000 on tuition and fees for those 2 years at the Ed School. You don't want to have wasted the taxpayers' hard-earned money, right? Therefore, any of the new electronics are things that they will go for. It allows them to implement all their little research experiments on the kiddies. Maybe they'll even get a paper in the Big-Ed journals about the results. These ladies are not just teachers, but educational high-tech research scholars. The kids ought to be OK, I guess ...

The big computer-tech companies that Michelle Malkin mentions are in a symbiotic relationship with the teachers and administrators. It means more big 10,000 unit deals to school districts, and more advertising by the school district about how advanced their kids are, you know, watching those funny cat videos with an occasional times-table question thrown in, stuff like that. Uhh, that's if you're lucky and before puberty...

Besides selling units, BTW the Big-Comp-Tech F.A.G.S. can make a lot more money selling data. It is the Information Age, they say. With that background understood, one can see why this next sort of thing, the purposeful intrusions into the privacy of your kids, will happen:
Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had secretly harvested "tens of millions of medical records" with identifying names, lab results, diagnoses, immunization records and prescriptions from thousands of hospitals across 21 states. "Project Nightingale" was a partnership with Ascension health system to build a search tool and data analytics using machine-learning algorithms. At least 150 Google employees had access to confidential patient data. Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have acquired private health data as well. It's a massive Big Tech bonanza.

The implications for selling off children's private health information are chilling. Like federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act protections for patients, federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protections have been sabotaged by "public-private partnerships" between government education officials and tech companies with insatiable appetites for data.

Will "trust us" cut it when Google gets access to your kids' school-based health records?
I hope the reader will still click on Miss Malkin's article, as I'm excerpting 1/3 of it here. I just wanted to point out the real Orwellian aspect of this:
Meet "Gaggle." Fully integrated with Google Apps for Education and designated as a Google "Premier Partner," this snooping system is marketed to school districts as a "safety" mechanism for students. Through 24/7 monitoring of kids' online use, Gaggle "alerts school officials when students show signs of self-harm, depression, thoughts of suicide, substance abuse, cyberbullying, unhealthy relationships, and credible threats of violence against others."
You don't need to download 1984 (because it won't be in the school library) and read it again to know where all that shit's heading.

Why does this stuff go on? If parents made the effort, they could stop it, as the Feds haven't taken over completely yet. Peak Stupidity's obvious recommendation is to "poke the Beast in the eye with a big stick", per our posts on homeschooling Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

As I see it, things go on like this because the Moms are often much more involved with the schooling than the Dads. Most Dads (count me as one) do not want to hang out in meetings with the status-concious, money-unconsious Moms and get overruled by the Principal on the topic of more recess right off the bat. For at least 1/4 of the kids, the Mom is the only one deciding anything about the subject as there IS NO Dad. The Moms do not want to make waves and become social outcasts for saying things that need to be said, whether on the Political Correctness infestation or this relatively new Orwellian iEspionage. Thank goodness for one particular Mom, Miss Michelle Malkin!

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